


Lifetime to Come, Lifetime to Go

by dontdarlingmedarling



Category: Everybody's Talking About Jamie - Dan Gillespie Sells/Tom MacRae
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 10:44:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19271638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dontdarlingmedarling/pseuds/dontdarlingmedarling
Summary: She can’t nail down a relationship and worries that she’s wasted her life - and now the new kid on the block at Legs Eleven is making her feel like a drag dinosaur. There’s a clock on the wall, and it’s moving too fucking fast for Tray C. Sophisticay.





	Lifetime to Come, Lifetime to Go

Nothing quite like fresh talent to make a bitch feel ancient. Of course Loco’s new protégée was going to steal every show from here on out until some other fresh-faced bit of fish stepped up to replace her. Endless cycle.

Tray huffed a pony-snort of a sigh out through her nose, a cloud of smoke coming with it, before taking another drag of her cigarette. The orange paper around the filter was flecked with magenta glitter; a little glimmer of fabulous in amongst the drab of the night. The only hint of colour elsewhere was the lights of the bar reflected pink-purple-blue in the scummy puddles on the ground. Same shit; same miserable, shitty weather - just a different day.

Hell, Mimi Me wasn’t even performing today - her debut had been two weeks ago, and the bar was yet to be as busy or as bouncing as it had been that night. What did that leave her with? Lacklustre cheers and drag fucking bingo. No two words set her teeth on edge more than ‘drag bingo’ - whose bastard great idea had that been? It did pay her rent, but it felt like the sell-out of the century. Just cracking crass jokes to elicit laughs from pissed straight women who took every opportunity to grope her tits or ask her to teach them how to do their makeup. Yuck.

It took more effort than she was willing to admit to, not being envious of Jamie. He’d stepped offstage to rapturous applause, and left after his first show with a trail of doting groupies behind him - thoroughly adored. Now that kind of attention, Tray missed - her ego had been in desperate need of a good stroke lately.

But it spooked her a bit - something about the whole affair got uncomfortably deep under her skin. The guys cornering Tray as she had her post-show fag behind the club to ask when Mimi was going to be back, or crowding round Mimi herself at the bar offering to buy her drinks were all too old for her. He was still very much a baby in her eyes - as much as she wanted the type of attention for herself, it worried her to watch him receive it. She wasn’t even sure if he’d noticed - too blinded by the stage lights, too green and caught-up in the excitement of it all to pay it any mind. Whatever.

Were any of the others thinking about this? Probably not. Loco, self-involved and grandiose as ever, was generally so up herself she had to stick her toothbrush up her arse to clean her teeth. She’d been around a lot more recently - bitten by the bug again, perhaps. But regardless of how often she’d been present, she wasn’t any less obtuse. Why bother her arse with thinking about anybody besides Loco?

Tray doubted Laika had picked up on what was concerning her, either - no, she was lucky if she had two brain cells to rub together. Sandra, maybe - but she wouldn’t care much if she did. Stuff it all down, into the back of some mental junk drawer - emotions were a problem for the future, and thinking only tied you down. Life’s more painless when you’re brainless, huh?

Oh, the joys of being the only person with a modicum of self-awareness in a group of bitchy queens. The real crux was probably that they were all older than her; too many years of sleepless nights and heavy drinking to be able to care about anybody besides themselves. It was a good way to be, she imagined. No worrying about menial things like feelings, or having a conscience.

The drag scene was so stagnant around here that the four of them were really...it. Lots of going - not much in the way of coming. Ha-ha. A good number of queens she’d known had since aged out and retired, but very seldom did fresh talent step up to take their place. No wonder Jamie had caused such a stir - he was the first thing half of her audience had seen that wasn’t essentially a propped-up cadaver in pancake makeup.

Tray surmised that she felt this way because she’d been the last Jamie - that had been a fair few years back, sure, but she was still the most recent one in. So she was in a weird place - not quite at Laika and Sandra’s level of comfortable, booze-induced ignorance, but then too late into the game to still really find it exciting. Just her luck.

She’d always been like this - either feeling far too much, or not at all. She was sitting on the cusp of jaded, blissful benightedness, but until then she guessed this was it. She noticed that the chill of the night wind had put her cigarette out as she went to take a drag, and she placed it back between her lips; stuffing the pack of Embassy Regals into her bra and cupping one hand against the breeze as her neon-pink Bic relit the tobacco.  

She was in her thirties - on the wrong side of thirty, really, and that was tantamount to being dead in gay years. God’s sake. Her life was slipping by her at an alarming rate. She felt as though she’d blinked and missed it. Last she’d checked, she’d been fresh in town, living out of a suitcase, the whole thing brand new and brilliant to her. And suddenly, she’d opened her eyes and it was thirteen years later, and she had stagnated where she stood - life wasn’t as chaotic, but in being calm it was now boring. Same flat and steady job for years now; the same faces every day. More or less the same face every day, although the slow procession toward old age was well underway, smile lines and crows’ feet that she hated growing more cavernous by the minute, or so it felt. She couldn’t recall where the time had gone.

She hadn’t done too badly for herself, for some gay kid from Paisley who’d quit uni to go pursue some pipe dream of becoming a drag queen in London. Although that plan had kind of gone to buggery quickly.

She’d made it to Sheffield before giving up. Typical of her, really. Settling for what she could get, rather than striving for something she really wanted. Did she care? Probably not. See, she felt her problem wasn’t so much worrying about everything as it was feeling like she SHOULD be worried about everything, and then simply getting through life by being outwardly blasé. She worried about being worried, and then about how not-worried she was about things. Fuck sake. Tray slumped herself against the wall, one high-heeled foot resting against the red brick to steady herself. A vacation from the inside of her own head would be just grand.

Maybe she would have been famous, in another life. But now - a moderately successful run at a local bar, and a long succession of shitty boyfriends later, she was happy-ish with mediocrity.

Ah, the boyfriend saga. She felt a bit like Henry XVIII at times, but then again she was yet to behead anybody. Plus she felt as though a lot of her breakups had been justified - coming home after work to find her (now-ex) man  fucking another guy - in her bed, with the door wide open - for instance. That one had stung.

Ditto her brief fling with Laika - that had just ended in awkwardness as she realised how much _gayer_ the other queen was than her. Her outward campness had been enough to make life hell when she was in school, but when compared to the other queen she was practically hetero. She thought maybe her own life would maybe be simpler if she could live it to Laika’s philosophy - spend it just bipping around half-drunk all the time; only caring about who’s fucking who, and lipstick, and gossip, and shiny things.

Work had been weird for a week or two - but they’d had Sandra there to act as a sort of buffer, and it had passed with time. Drag queens are seldom the most restful souls to be around - a drag queen fucking another drag queen was surely just made to end in a shitshow.

And as for the rest - nobody had been notably shittier than anybody else, but she noticed that she, for all her outward opinionatedness and her razor tongue, seldom did the actual breaking up. Her exes didn’t like how femme she was; how shrill and obnoxious. They didn’t like how unafraid she was of her feminine side; they were intimidated by how little Fraser feared Tray. They hated that she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. That she was messy, that she was a loud drunk - they didn’t like her accent, they couldn’t stand her smoking. A lot of really menial issues that tended to feel so menial in fact, that Tray often wondered if it was just her, on some sort of inherent level, who was profoundly unloveable.

The gay population in this city had a propensity to be real scumbags. Then again, so did the straight population - it certainly hadn’t been the queers who’d put her in hospital with cracked ribs and two missing teeth a few years back.

Sometimes she wondered what the fuck exactly she was doing with herself. Nothing of value, nothing of substance. Really, nothing.

On the odd occasions that her mum called - and it was only ever her mum; her dad never wanted to talk to her. If he ever did, he just used it as an opportunity for a long-distance queer-bashing - she really struggled to come up with anything to tell her that she’d done or achieved. Making a steady living as a drag queen was an achievement in and of itself, granted - but besides that, what was really the point in her?

Wasn’t there that philosopher bloke who said ‘I think, therefore I am’? Or maybe it had been Shakespeare? Who-the-fuck-ever. Either way, Tray certainly wasn’t doubting her own existence - if anything, she was doing enough thinking for maybe two or three of her.

Whatever the case, time had been steadily going faster and faster for years now, and she wished it would stop. She wanted it to slow down - let her enjoy being alive, find a decent man, settle down, and just _be_ for a fucking second. It wasn’t exactly like she had much time left on her clock to do _that_. She hadn’t lived enough life to be this old. But she wasn’t even that old. But she felt it. Jesus H. fucking Christ, she needed to shut her head up.

Too much philosophical bollocks, too late at night. Tray reckoned she just needed a fucking drink.

“You got a light?” Speaking of bollocks - Sandra had just stepped out of the stage door in her knickers and a hoodie - standard pre-show attire. Without saying anything, Tray handed the pink lighter to her; the two standing in silence as Sandra lit up, Tray thankful for Sandra functioning as a windbreak for her. Sandra handed the garish little piece of plastic back to Tray. “Cheers.”

“Pleasure, treasure.” Tray gave a tight-lipped smile as she stuffed the lighter back into her bra; dropping the still-smouldering butt of her fag onto the ground, and grinding it out with the heel of her silver platform. She folded her arms against the cold; not wanting to go back inside the second Sandra left; that would make her look like an arsehole.

“You alright, chook? You’ve been out here for ages.”

“Aye.” She said simply; before taking the pack from her other bra cup and withdrawing another cigarette, placing it between her lips to light. “Aw, fuck it - one of those nights.” Her words slurred as she pursed the cig between her lips; taking a deep inhale and blowing it out in one stream.

“What’s on your mind?” Maybe Sandra was more perceptive than Tray gave her credit for.

“Nothin’.” She shrugged, curling her lip a little with the gesture. “Just feeling a bit...I dunno. Past it?”

“I know the feeling - bloody Jamie.” Sandra gave a small smile. “Told you he’d make you feel about two hundred years old. It’s life. You’re born, you grow up, you parade around in women’s clothing mouthing the words to other people’s songs, then you die.”

“Aye. Life’s a beach.” Tray laughed through her nose, looking to the ground and scuffing her fag butt back and forward along the pavement; the world seeming a little less gray now that she was in some sort of company. It maybe wasn’t all bad - they were sisters, after all. She was in good company - albeit having had to learn a couple of lessons the hard way about not shitting where she ate.

She was in an unconventional sort of workplace, granted, but then again maybe it was just an equivalent of a normal person’s nine-to-five blues, worrying that she’d fucked it all up and thrown her life away on a job she was meh about at best. Her nine-to-five was nine pm til five am, but still.

She supposed this was just another day at the office.

  


**Author's Note:**

> I harbour an incredibly deep-seated adoration for the Legs Eleven girls; specifically Tray (I'm a mouthy Scottish drag queen myself, so obviously I'm going to love her) and really, I had to write this to get it out of my system. Lots of weird irrelevant head canon bollocks. Oh well - it is what it is. Hope you enjoyed xoxo


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